You have heard that it was said,
You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.
Humanly speaking, this old adage did seem to make sense. Loving ones enemies seemed like a recipe for strategic disaster. Wouldn't it open one up to further abuse and persecution? And anyway, didn't one's enemies implicitly indicate that they didn't want his love by their hostility toward him? What can be more futile than loving someone who did not desire that love and who would only twist it as one more weapon against him? It's important to consider this from a human perspective first in order to truly understand the radical nature of the teaching of Jesus.
But I say to you, love your enemies
and pray for those who persecute you
We tend to take this command for granted, telling ourselves that we don't have any real enemies or persecutors. We give our tacit approval of this teaching from a distance by endorsing figures like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr but assuming it doesn't apply to us directly. But what if it does? What if our apparent lack of enemies has more to do with a blind spot on our part than a genuine absence? Is there a place out of sight and out of mind to which we relegate those who do not reciprocate our love? Obviously we do not want to pray that those who are hostile to goodness and justice succeed at their malformed desires. But we are meant to want something more and better for them than they even want for themselves, something to which we are not more deserving, but rather to which they are every bit as entitled as ourselves.
that you may be children of your heavenly Father,
for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good,
and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.
The love of the Father that creates the conditions for life and growth is not predicated on perfection, even on goodness, or on being in perfect agreement with him. Rather he pours out his love on sinners in order to turn them into saints and on saints in order to bring them even closer to his heart. It is true that we often limit the amount of rain and sunlight we will allow the Father to send us, but that limitation is entirely on our side and not on his own.
It is the peacemakers who will be called children of God. We can see that the only way to be a true peacemaker is seeing a bigger picture than the immediate hostility of our opposition and embracing the command of Jesus to love our enemies. We love our enemies because we know that they can be friends of God, that they too are meant to be children of the one heavenly Father.
And if you greet your brothers only,
what is unusual about that?
Do not the pagans do the same?
We tend to gradually forget about those who don't reciprocate our love. If we say hello and receive no response often enough we will probably give it up. But Jesus is calling us to be able to love even if we don't receive immediate gratification. We are meant to will something greater for them than merely our own self-affirmation. Today let us take note of the blind spots in our minds and hearts that we have allowed to take shape because of our own woundedness. There may be many opportunities to love as the Father loves that we will miss unless we take a longer look at the ways in which our own love has been intentionally limited to which provides the most immediate rewards. Self-affirmation isn't inherently bad, but the tax collectors also love at this level. We are called to a higher standard because the love with which we love is not simply from ourselves, but the Holy Spirit himself helping us love like the Father.
I say this not by way of command,
but to test the genuineness of your love
by your concern for others.
We are called to a love that is freely given, not merely a love which we do to avoid punishment our attain an immediate reward. But this is more than a merely human love. We can only love in this way if we first receive it as a gift from our Lord Jesus. But he himself never ceases to offer it. All we need to do is to open ourselves to it.
For you know the gracious act of our Lord Jesus Christ,
that for your sake he became poor although he was rich,
so that by his poverty you might become rich.
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